American kids are taught in elementary school that Arctic sea ice is melting at an alarming rate and soon will be gone. And it is all our fault, as humans have magically assumed control over the Earth’s ever-changing climate.
In fact, the Earth’s climate has always fluctuated rather widely, and we have been living in a relatively cool era by modern, post-Ice Age standards. Global temperatures in recent millennia have been cooler than what has generally prevailed since the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years or so ago, according to multiple measurements.
Here are more data: New Study: Arctic Was Much Warmer 6000 Years Ago… 90% Of Glaciers, Ice Caps Smaller Than Present Or Absent.
Climate alarmists hate this inconvenient fact: hundreds of temperature reconstructions show that the northern hemisphere was much warmer over much of the past 10,000 years (Holocene) than it is today.
One recent study: Arctic glaciers and ice caps through the Holocene: a circumpolar synthesis of lake-based reconstructions by Laura J. Larocca and Yarrow Axford, published in the journal Climate of the Past, examined the Arctic ice cap and glaciers over a large part of the Arctic.
This chart summarizes the study’s findings, but it is a little confusing because the line is upside down. The higher the line, the less glacier and sea ice in the Arctic:
More:
In the paper’s Figure 10d (above), the higher the curve, the smaller were the glaciers. Clearly we see that the Arctic region glaciers were much smaller 6000 years ago than today. Many in fact disappeared altogether and so summers were warmer.
The authors write:
We find the highest percentage (>90 %) of Arctic GICs smaller than present or absent in the middle Holocene at ∼ 7–6 ka, probably reflecting more spatially ubiquitous and consistent summer warmth during this period than in the early Holocene.
Adding:
Our review finds that in the first half of the Holocene, most of the Arctic’s small GICs became significantly reduced or melted away completely in response to summer temperatures that, on average, were only moderately warmer than today.
Thus, predictions of the glaciers’ demise have proved to be wrong. Like pretty much all predictions made by environmental alarmists over the last several decades.
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